God who? Flashcards
St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430), City of God
Original sin
Original sin is inevitable and inbuilt
For as man the parent is, such is man the offspring
Man is therefore doomed to physical death and eternal suffering
Man cannot ‘chose to sin’ but is born into it
Pelagius the heretic monk (circa 300 - 400)
Spurned by ‘The Church Establishment’
He proposed that: -
Evil is the direct result of human actions freely chosen
Man in the driving seat determining his own actions
BUT!
Heresy says The Church
However! There is always ‘the problem of evil’
If God is all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful, then how can there be evil in the world?
The Calvinistic approach
Two groups
God knows long before you’re born whether he is or is not going to save you
First - ‘The Elect’ - predestined for salvation
Second - ‘The Preterite’ - predestined for hell!
The Prime Mover (Aristotle, Physics, book viii, chapter 9
Uncaused cause, unmoved mover - one and the same
The first cause that ‘just was’ i.e. cause and effect
The Prime Mover, neither changes or moves?
Is animate
All things move and change in order to approach some goal or ‘final cause’: -
- Perfection
- Everything strives to be all that it can be
- The efficient cause of a chair is the carpenter
Everything that happens is caused by something else
Thomas Aquinas (13th Century) tried to use the Prime Mover the ‘unmoved mover’ as proof of God
Is the Prime Mover (God) thought that thinks about itself?
Perfection (as God) that considers its own perfection?
BUT - based on unprovable assumptions
Prime Mover continued.
Matter (qualities) + Form (shapes and positions) = the TWO essential components = Causes - material, formal , efficient, final
As opposed to Newton - Energy + Matter
Ergo, is the ‘efficient’ cause of a chair, tree > wood > chair = carpenter?
Heavens move in a circle caused by an element call Aether (Aristotle)
Occam’s Razor
William of Ockham, Quodlibeta, Book v (ca 1324)
Prefigured modernity
Plurality is not to be assumed without necessaity
Trims absurdities out of arguments
The simpler an explanation is the better
Valid explanations must be based on simple and observable facts supplemented by pure logic
If it isn’t necessary to introduce complexities or hypotheticals into an argument, don’t do it
Occam’s premise
God exits via faith or revelation
You can’t prove the existence of God
Theology and science are different don’t mix
Thomas Aquinas and the scholastics (text men) wanted to provide rational explanations and proofs of God’s existence
He tried to treat universal concepts such as names i.e. Good and Great as real entities, a doctrine known as ‘realism’
Occam’s retort was ‘nonsense’, you cannot treat names as realities, they are descriptions, i.e. the idea that names are just names is called ‘nominalism’
Elms and oaks are trees because we have decided that they are what makes a tree a tree, a physical and real object in time and space. If they were all suddenly cut down and gone, there would be no physical thing called treeness left, just a memory (abstraction or idea) of the objects themselves
St Anslem of Canterbury 1033 a 1109 (Italian)
Ontological proof (Greek, Ontos, ‘being’ - as long as we can imagine absolute perfection, then it must exist. If it exists, it is God.
But! If God does not exist, he cannot be ‘improved’ or made more perfect by adding existence to him, since there is no ‘Him’ to add anything to.
If the predicate ‘exists’ disappears, so does the subject ‘God’ or whatever other subject is being proposed - Unicorns, aliens, fairies, elves etc.
Kant blows this out of the water as above in 1781 - the flaw lies in treating a grammatical unit - the predicate ‘to be’ e.g. Imagining a beautiful unicorn, as an ontological quantity ‘being’ i.e. something that does and can be proved to exist. Beautiful unicorns have not (as yet) been proved to exist.
Ontology, at its simplest, is the study of existence. But it is much more than that, too. Ontology is also the study of how we determine if things exist or not, as well as the classification of existence. It attempts to take things that are abstract and establish that they are, in fact, real.
Pascal’s Wager
Your belief or disbelief in God amounts to a wager. If God exists and the bible is true, bliss in heaven awaits you. If he doesn’t exist, all you are losing is the finite pleasures of a finite life, so just believe, just play the game.
BUT, God being God, will realise you didn’t believe and were just gambling ergo, you are stuffed!
Herodotus the famous Greek historian 5th C BC, on peoples and what a poet of the time told him.
‘Custom is king’ (nomos nomoi)
In wars, fathers bury their sons, in peace, sons bury their fathers
Fortune and fate is all
Philosophy - Painting by Salvator Rosa (1615-1673)
‘Be silent, unless what you have to say is better than silence’
Painting of a philosopher looking at the viewer with a stern expression.
In the painting, the philosopher thrusts a tablet bearing a Latin inscription towards us – translated, it reads: ‘Keep silent, unless your speech is better than silence.’ The phrase is taken from Stobaeus’s Anthologia, a fifth-century collection of extracts from Greek authors.
Solon to Croesus on the question of happiness.
‘Look to the end, no matter what it is you are considering. Often enough God gives man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him.’
Herodotus, The Histories, 32
Erinyes and Furies
Goddess’s of vengeance against oath breakers and the insolent
God is dead!
Friedrich Nietzsche - Religion, by focusing on eternal life, is actually a kind of death: it turns us away from life and truth, which are in the world and not in some supernatural never-never land. It perpetuates intolerance and conformity - a ‘slave mentality’, therefore dogma, conformity, superstition, fear, must be overcome . For a man or woman to live, they must kill God and become the ‘overman’.
herd morality” and the “herd instinct” (Nietzsche) in human society.
The rock revelation - What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence” … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine”.
Heraclitus- The obscure one - late 6th C. BC
“You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on”.
“Fire - The thunderbolt pilots all things”, logos , reason, logic - a guiding principle.
“Opposition brings concord”.
Imperfections
We are imperfections that live in a world that constantly disappoints us whilst we try to grasp perfection that is always fleeting, transient and just out of grasp. Experiencing it for a moment (we think) makes it all the more disappointing, as our falling back again into the morass that is real life, is then much more despairing.
Cromwell’s Warning.
The reference is to Oliver Cromwell, who wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on 3 August 1650, shortly before the Battle of Dunbar, including a phrase that has become well known and frequently quoted:[2]
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
Metaphysics
Derived from the Greek meta ta physika (“after the things of nature”); referring to an idea, doctrine, or posited reality outside of human sense perception. In modern philosophical terminology, metaphysics refers to the studies of what cannot be reached through objective studies of material reality.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility.[1] It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.[
Shelley’s Frankenstein
..,but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.
Protagoras - (5th C BC) - Sophist (knowledge for payment)
Man is the measure of all things, in that things exist by virtue of how we perceive them.
The object world is measured against man, and there is nothing outside man that determines being or truth.
Modern interpretation -our needs and desires determine what counts in this world.
The three laws of thought (Aristotle)
1) A thing is identical to itself. ‘The Law of Identity’ - A= A, e.g., Socrates is Socrates.
2) A thing cannot at once both be and not-be. A and not A = ‘The Law of Contradiction’. e.g., ‘It is false that Socrates is at once a man and not-a-man.
3) Given a definite state or quality A, a thing must either have it or not “Either A or not A” = ‘The Law of the Excluded Middle’, since there is no middle ground between A and not-A, e.g., ‘Socrates is either alive or not alive.’
Cogito Ergo Sum!
I think, therefore I am!
But…we still have to locate where ‘The Mind’ actually is?
Hume’s Fork
Sorts interesting problems from bogus ones
David Hume 1711 - 1776 develops his own view on ideas put forward by Gottfried Leibniz 1646 - 1716 and Descartes
Every statement or claim falls into three categories:-
1 either true or false by definition
2 dependant on experience
3 just nonsense
The three tines of Hume’s fork
Only item 2 is interesting which is why he’s called an empiricist from the Latin for experience
Hume attempted to replace the empty certainties of mathematics and science with a more meaningful model of reality based on human psychology, probability, and habitual behaviour.
The Scandal of Induction
Deduction - which derives new truths from established ones
Induction- passes from particular observations to general conclusions
A hypothesis becomes theory if established through repeated experiments but is rejected if contradicted (falsified) by experiment
The ‘scandal’ of induction, as it’s come to be known, is that the number of observations are necessarily limited- you can’t keep throwing rocks at windows forever
Inductive knowledge: it’s an oxymoron - forces together two terms which are seemingly incompatible
